Since the moment it was first announced, Matchbox Racing Adventures felt like a surefire hit when it comes to offering up a healthy variety of fun and excitement when it comes to racing and side content. With a plethora of cars available, Matchbox Racing Adventures has you join a new town as something of a gopher and something of a savior at the same time for its core adventure mode.
Beach Break
There, you’ll help the town out with things like putting out fires, taking people to the hospital and other timing-centric missions. These areas very much evoke Crazy Taxi, with the timed missions basically being the same core formula minus a time bonus because the missions have a set cutoff on the amount of people you can help with that task. The missions are more varied than that, but those are the ones I found myself enjoying the most because they still reward you for being more efficient with more in-game money.
Winter Wonderland
The non-timer missions are a blend of races, getting from point A to B to get to new locales, and Chase HQ-style action races where you have to stop people from doing bad things. As a family-friendly game, the goal is more to stop people from causing mischief at the beach than drug busts, but the core gameplay is similar and it’s nice to have so much variety in a single racing game package. Within it, you have something to scratch a bit of a Chase HQ/NFS Hot Pursuit itch alongside a bit of Crazy Taxi, and regular races with even the A to B sections being fun to replay since you’re still graded on time there.
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Save the City
The core racing action is a lot of fun and quite varied with a series of championship cups to compete for over many kinds of track locales. You can race in a city, volcano, beach, an ice-filled area and more. Those who are veteran racing fans can enjoy a fully-controlled experience while those in need of more assists can opt to either have auto-acceleration on and/or auto-drive enabled. These can be handy timesavers for regular play beyond making the game more playable if someone truly needs it because it cuts down on the time needed to complete A to B races or regular races.
The core racing action is a lot of fun and quite varied with a series of championship cups to compete for over many kinds of track locales.
The open-world sections are parts that I would never recommend using the auto-drive on since it doesn’t allow for quick turns and will wind up sending you in the wrong direction at least a few times during more-expansive sections. Still, for regular races and even pursuit areas, it can be a big time saver. Pursuit chases wind up being nerfed nicely with it and that can come in handy when you have high quotas to hit for ramming into your rival.
At $39.99, Matchbox Racing Adventures does have a bit of a high price for a licensed racer – but what’s here is pretty well made. Outright Games can be hit or miss, but this is probably the best game I’ve played that they’ve published. The sheer amount of variety in what’s offered up is impressive and it’s largely well executed. Bonus points go out to the accessibility features too since they make life easier for all players.
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